As a small boy growing up in Hartsville, SC, Lee Stogner liked taking things apart — but he liked putting them back together even more. These early production feats led him to Clemson for a BS in electrical and computer engineering and then off to the University of South Carolina for an MS in systems engineering. He took these degrees and worked as a director for companies such as Fluor, Rockwell and Milliken.
But his mission now is "to grow better engineers than any other state," and his personality and expertise are vital to establishing S.C. as a forerunner in the clean transportation market.
As chair of the S.C. Engineering Cluster, he is our local, regional and nationwide connection to the more than "45,000 S.C. engineers [who are] developing new technologies and designing major projects around the world in almost every industry." This group represents government, economic development, professional societies, academia and engineering companies that play an important part in developing and keeping a wealth of expertise in our state.
"The coast has a strong environmental engineering emphasis, the Midlands concentrate on roads and bridges and the Upstate has process engineering like the building of plants," he says. Along with process engineering is the very heavy emphasis on transportation in Greenville with Michelin, BMW and CU-ICAR (Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research). This transportation has led him to develop a worldwide blog on LinkedIn called "Clean Transportation" that has contributors from the UK discussing Hertz boosting its number of electric vehicles, to a Clemson graduate research student asking about the "bad press on ethanol."
This engineering prominence in clean transportation seems to be impossible to overstate as Colorado's Proterra elected CU-ICAR as a manufacturing site and the city has homegrown JH Global Services, Inc. For more information on clean transportation and the South Carolina Engineering Cluster, please visit
www.southcarolinaengineering.org.